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Ron Moody
 
Even that uninformed man in the street might just be able to come up with Ron Moody's name if asked to remember a man who made a reputation starring in British musicals - well, one musical to be truthful. It was Moody's great good fortune to be around when the part of a lifetime turned up, and a star of revue became the best-known character leading man of the British musical stage.
 
One fact underpins Ron Moody's lasting claim to fame: he played Fagin in Oliver! There are very few British actors who have enjoyed such enormous success in one role, or who went on to cement that performance on film (Tommy Steele's Kipps in Half a Sixpence is another contender). Without doubt, it was the high point of a varied and interesting career, one to which he perhaps made the mistake of bringing too many talents. His programme notes from 1966 introduce him as 'an author, composer and actor; a star of films, stage and television; a musician, dancer and impressionist … and an enthusiastic amateur archaeologist'.
 
 
Picking a pocket or two as Fagin in Oliver!
 
He was born Ronald Moodnick in London on 8 January 1924 and his education encompassed the London School of Economics. Before going into the theatre he was a research graduate in sociology, which may or may not have given him a taste for the great number of years he spent impersonating the variety of mankind in revue.
 
He was almost thirty before he made his first professional appearance in December 1952 at the New Lindsey Theatre, in the revue Intimacy at Eight. This began his long association with the revue writer Peter Myers and his writing team (including David Climie, Alec Grahame and the composers Ronnie Cass and John Pritchett), to whom Moody owed much of his early success. For the next six years Moody played exclusively in revues, all of which proved very successful commercially: More Intimacy at Eight (1953), Intimacy at 8.30 (Criterion Theatre April 1954), For Amusement Only (Apollo Theatre June 1956), and - his last revue - For Adults Only, at the Strand Theatre in June 1958. Because of the lack of original cast recordings of these shows, his contributions to them are mostly lost, but alongside such stalwart performers as Miriam Karlin and Hugh Paddick, Moody distinguished himself as a brilliant player. Among the memorable vignettes he created over the years were his pierrot stranded at London airport, and his Dylan Thomas in 'Over Milk Wood' (For Adults Only), and his hilarious participation in a spoof on amateur operatics, 'The Vagabond Student' (For Amusement Only).
 
He was lucky to have played so consistently in a genre that made the most of his talents, and lucky to get out when it had little time left to run. His first theatrical venture outside revue was in a famed American musical, Leonard Bernstein's Candide, seen at the Saville Theatre in April 1959, with Moody in the supporting role of the Governor of Buenos Aires. In fact, at the time Candide was pretty well ignored - only later did it gain its cult status. It was his first substantial flop, for London was no more ready for the piece than Broadway had been.
 
It hardly mattered, for Moody's luck was about to change forever. He was cast as Fagin in a new musical based on Dickens' novel Oliver Twist - a show whose future seemed so uncertain during a disappointing pre-London tour that its London opening was almost cancelled. It wasn't, and on its opening night (in June 1960 at the New Theatre), history was made, and Moody's name joined the pantheon of British musical greats. Most of the show's hits belonged to other characters in the show ('As Long As He Needs Me' and 'Food, Glorious Food' among them), but even Moody's numbers - 'You've Got To Pick a Pocket or Two' and 'Reviewing the Situation' -gained a real currency, and the critics were loud in their praise of his performance. Revue had helped to shape it, and there was no denying the skill with which Moody managed to sketch something real from the material at hand. He didn't go with the show to Broadway, where Clive Revill took his part, but was cast again for the film version. Anyway, it was a role that Moody somehow found the measure of, although nobody was going to confuse him with Alec Guinness, who had created a very different and much more real Fagin in the British film directed by David Lean.
 
Beneath the surface there lurked a project that was to obsess Moody for years. He wanted to play the great eighteenth century clown Joseph Grimaldi, once the beloved droll of Sadler's Wells Theatre, and he had written a show about his hero. Joey (as the work was known at its first appearance) was presented for the Christmas season at Bristol Old Vic in 1962, and Moody left the Oliver! company to fulfil his destiny and play Grimaldi. Almost exactly four years later, in the autumn of 1966, the Grimaldi show resurfaced at Manchester as The Great Grimaldi, with book music and lyrics by Moody, now playing Grimaldi with a cast that included Vivienne Martin (often cast by Moody) as his wife Mary.
 
The Manchester opening was what might politely be called 'troubled', and Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall were brought in to fix the rambling book. They didn't really manage it, and when the show eventually made it to London as Joey, Joey at the Saville Theatre in October 1966, the critics were distinctly lacklustre in their praise. There was little praise for Moody as either writer or performer. In fact, there was hardly a word in the reviews that could be extracted for a halfway decent advertisement; a hard fate for so attractive and innocent a thing as Joey, Joey. Moody's fame assured wide coverage of his discomfiture. He was quoted in the papers as saying he might retire from the stage altogether, so crushing had been the blow of his dream child's collapse. Meanwhile, Joey, Joey limped on for a couple of weeks, but the management clearly had no faith in it, and the thinly attended houses watched Moody come out of character in an effort to lighten the situation.
 
The truth was that nothing was ever going to come up to the success he had enjoyed with Oliver! It stormed on through countless revivals while poor Joey, Joey was ignored. From the West End he moved to King's Cross. Moody can have found little consolation playing Darling and Captain Hook in Peter Pan at the Scala Theatre immediately following the closure of Joey, Joey in 1966. He went back to Peter Myers and Ronnie Cass, his revue writers, for the musical Liz, premiered at the Marlowe Theatre Canterbury in the summer of 1968. He played Aristophanes at the head of a cast of British toilers in the field (including Sally Smith, Jenny Wren and Sheila White) but producers didn't offer a helping hand to Liz, and it was left to wither on the vine.
As if the experience of Joey, Joey hadn't been discouraging enough, he tried again with a show of his own devising, Saturnalia, at the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry in August 1971, but it was a dreadful time for British musicals. He didn't appear in it, but was the show's director. Vivienne Martin was in the cast that had among it Gemma Craven and the veteran Laurence Payne, but the great British public served the show with the contempt it so often reserved for such endeavours, and Saturnalia was allowed to quietly play out its fixed weeks at Coventry without being bothered to move anywhere else. After a break into Shakespeare - playing Polonius and First Gravedigger in Hamlet in 1972 - he went back to doing Hook, and subsequently played the Barrie roles in a new British musical version with only a so-so score. The truth is that after Oliver! he couldn't find a decent score.
 
In March 1973 Moody returned to Fagin for a production seen in America, but in Britain his musical career seemed to come to an end when he was cast as another great fictional character, Sherlock Holmes, in Leslie Bricusse's musical of the same name. This was a highly doubtful affair. The show's publicity talked of the 'intellectual' dimensions of the show, suggesting that those associated with it had ideas above the show's humdrum station. Sherlock Holmes washed up with third-division songs and ensured some truly embarrassing moments for Moody and his female star, Liz Robertson. The whole thing belittled Holmes's legend, and Moody seemed peculiarly miscast in it, even when asked to deliver such ghastly numbers as the one about going up the apples and pears. It was a long way from the glories of Fagin, and at least the public wasn't fooled by these tawdry goods. The show didn't run.
 
Through the years Moody has worked in straight theatre and films, but his reputation as an actor need not rest on these diversions (and his film appearances are mostly stagey affairs). The strength of his reputation owes most to Oliver!, although there will be some who regret that the sometimes wonderful score of Joey, Joey was never recorded, with poor Joe lamenting the sadness of 'The Life That I Lead', and singing the joys of his 'Hot Codlins'.
 
Selected discography
Original cast recordings of
Oliver!
Sherlock Holmes

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